Remote controllers are widely used along with electronic appliance products. Taking household appliances for example, in each household various types of remote control appliances which are from different manufacturers are used. Various types and manufacturers cause each household to have various types of remote controllers, which brings disarray and inexpedience in use.
A problem that people complain about all the time is about the batteries of the remote controllers: (1) the batteries have a relatively short service life and a variety of types, their replacement may be a trouble; and (2) as usually there is no prompt when a battery runs out of power, and the battery cannot be replaced in time, a resulting battery leakage may erode and damage the remote controller.
In view of these problems, some professional remote controller manufacturers have launched some universal remote controllers. These universal remote controllers usually have a learning function and a coding design, which basically solve the replacement related problems of the remote controllers, and thus are suitable for a single remote controller application.
However, these universal remote controllers encounter a bottleneck under the circumstances where one controller serves for more than one appliance. Due to the inconsistence in coding among the remote controllers from different manufacturers, a user has to recode the universal remote controller for different appliances, which increases the difficulty for users. In addition, the code input by keys is complicated and inconvenient.
Technically speaking, the universal remote controllers usually employ a remote control IC solution, in which the waveform data is integrated in its IC memory (firmware), falling under a static storage solution. Although thousands of sets of remote control waveform data are statically stored, but the number of the universal remote controllers actually used by each household is rather small, this forms a typical micro application of mass data resources. What is more important is that new remote control appliances are continuously launched, many of which employ new remote control waveforms. It is very difficult for a universal remote controller based on static storage in use to match with the fully dynamic characteristics of increasing numbers and changing waveforms of the new remote controllers.
Furthermore, a universal remote controller uses dynamic storage in its learning function, and stores the learned remote control waveform data in its internal memory, which is only used by the universal remote controller per se. The data is not stored in an external memory as a file for share with other universal remote controllers, so that the resources are wasted. The universal remote controller itself does not use the waveform data resources learned from other universal remote controllers either.